Actors Programming for the Mobile Cloud

Actor programming languages provide the kind of inherent parallelism that is needed for building applications in the mobile cloud. This is because the Actor model provides encapsulation (isolation of local state), fair scheduling, location transparency, and locality of reference. These properties facilitate building secure, scalable concurrent systems. Not surprisingly, very large-scale applications such as Facebook chat service and Twitter have been written in actor languages. The paper introduces the basics of the actor model and gives a high-level overview of the problem of coordination in actor systems. It then describes several novel methods for reasoning about concurrent systems that are both effective and scalable.